Friday, March 01, 2013

"Perelandra"

From a German client who works on cosmic strings and whats not:
about the last paragraph: I will work on this. In the meantime I send
you the paragraph of C.S. Lewis' book (Chapter 17, starting from page
277f - you should certainly read the book, it is very fascinating!).
At the end of this story, the protagonist sees the Great Dance of the
creation of the world, which develops out of a praise of God:

And now, by a transition which he did not notice, seemed that what had
begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be
remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance.
It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or
bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced
in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it
became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of
which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity - only to be
itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal
decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and
the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but
finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it
had abdicated. He could see also (but the word 'seeing' is now plainly
inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, minute
corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these
particles were the secular generalities of which history tells - peoples,
institutions, climates of opinion, civilisations, arts, sciences, and the
like - ephemeral corpuscations that piped their short song and vanished.
The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and
died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say that.
But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so,
the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know
it. Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call
short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he
thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think
lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in
girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum
were the lines of the personal beings, and yet as different from one
another in splendour as all of them from all the previous class. But not
all the cords were individuals; some were universal truths or universal
qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons
were both cords and both stood together against the mere atoms of
generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: but
afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing
must have passed altogether out of the region of sight as we understand
it. For he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and
inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies
of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the
boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew
yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to
all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of
him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind
that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity,
complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the
hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension,
ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of
infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness,
a privacy and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest
from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off
encumbrances and awaking from trance, and coming to himself. With a
gesture of relaxation he looked about him...